If you want to acquire great talent in something, be prepared to spend several years working on it. Researchers estimated that ten years is the amount of time that it usually takes to acquire talent.

Or:

If the goal is to develop markets start by developing talent. If you want to accomplish the most amazing things focus on developing the talent of amazing people. Mentoring and coaching are the most important leadership roles... If you want to attract the best talent develop a reputation as the best talent developer.

My Question:

Is it wrong to talk in terms of acquiring, developing, or fostering talent? When one does so, does it suggest that we can "learn" or "acquire" talents?

Talent is often referred to as an innate ability to succeed at a particular task but the word can also mean a specific learned skill or ability. Someone who is a talented potter is someone who excels at being a potter. While they may have a predisposition toward pottery the term is more referring to their ability to make the task look easy or simple.

Talent is an affinity for something, but it takes time and hard work to develop that into something impressive.

My husband is a piano player and people always tell him how talented he is. That talent only shows because of years and years of lessons and practice. Talent is not something that just dropped in his lap to be picked up without effort.

There are different views about talent and one view popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers is that talent is something that can be "acquired" through "deliberate practice" (or preparation):

"For almost a generation,
psychologists around the world have
been engaged in a spirited debate over
a question that most of us would
consider to have been settled years
ago. The question is this: is there
such a thing as innate talent? The
obvious answer is yes. Not every
hockey player born in January ends up
playing at the professional level.
Only some do – the innately talented
ones. Achievement is talent plus
preparation. The problem with this
view is that the closer psychologists
look at the careers of the gifted, the
smaller the role innate talent seems
to play and the bigger role
preparation seems to play."

Gladwell is of course echoing Dr. Anders Ericsson who authored the the seminal book on how to acquire expertise, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance and got this review from Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner of The New York Times Magazine and authors of Freakonomics:

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise
and Expert Performance makes a rather
startling assertion: the trait we
commonly call talent is highly
overrated. Or, put another way, expert
performers "whether in memory or
surgery, ballet or computer
programming" are nearly always made,
not born. And yes, practice does make
perfect.

Ericsson however qualifies that the road to expertise is paved with a LOT OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE:

Among investigators of expertise, it
has generally been assumed that the
performance of experts improved as a
direct function of increases in their
knowledge through training and
extended experience. However, recent
studies show that there are, at least,
some domains where "experts" perform
no better then less trained
individuals (cf. outcomes of therapy
by clinical psychologists, Dawes,
1994) and that sometimes experts'
decisions are no more accurate than
beginners' decisions and simple
decision aids (Camerer & Johnson,
1991; Bolger & Wright, 1992). Most
individuals who start as active
professionals or as beginners in a
domain change their behavior and
increase their performance for a
limited time until they reach an
acceptable level. Beyond this point,
however, further improvements appear
to be unpredictable and the number of
years of work and leisure experience
in a domain is a poor predictor of
attained performance (Ericsson &
Lehmann, 1996). Hence, continued
improvements (changes) in achievement
are not automatic consequences of more
experience and in those domains where
performance consistently increases
aspiring experts seek out particular
kinds of experience, that is
deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe
& Tesch-Römer, 1993)--activities
designed, typically by a teacher, for
the sole purpose of effectively
improving specific aspects of an
individual's performance. For example,
the critical difference between expert
musicians differing in the level of
attained solo performance concerned
the amounts of time they had spent in
solitary practice during their music
development, which totaled around
10,000 hours by age 20 for the best
experts, around 5,000 hours for the
least accomplished expert musicians
and only 2,000 hours for serious
amateur pianists. More generally, the
accumulated amount of deliberate
practice is closely related to the
attained level of performance of many
types of experts, such as musicians
(Ericsson et al., 1993; Sloboda, et
al., 1996), chessplayers (Charness,
Krampe & Mayr, 1996) and athletes
(Starkes et al., 1996). (emphases in bold are mine)

Has anyone tried to put this into practice? Well, there's at least one and his name is Dan McLaughlin:

On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009,
Dan had decided to quit his job to
become a professional golfer.

He had almost no experience and even
less interest in the sport.

What he really wanted to do was test
the 10,000-hour theory he read about
in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller
Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the
amount of time it takes to get really
good at anything — "the magic number
of greatness."

The idea appealed to Dan. His 9-to-5
job as a commercial photographer had
become unfulfilling. He didn't want
just to pay his bills. He wanted to
make a change.

Could he stop being one thing and
start being another? Could he, an
average man, 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds,
become a pro golfer, just by trying?
Dan's not doing an experiment. He is
the experiment.

The Dan Plan will take six hours a
day, six days a week, for six years.
He is keeping diligent records of his
practice and progress. People who
study expertise say no one has done
quite what Dan is doing right now.

And then the Renaissance came and
everything changed, and we had this
big idea, and the big idea was let's
put the individual human being at the
center of the universe above all gods
and mysteries, and there's no more
room for mystical creatures who take
dictation from the divine. And it's
the beginning of rational humanism,
and people started to believe that
creativity came completely from the
self of the individual. And for the
first time in history, you start to
hear people referring to this or that
artist as being a genius rather than
having a genius. And I got to tell
you, I think that was a huge error.
You know, I think that allowing
somebody, one mere person to believe
that he or she is like, the vessel you
know, like the font and the essence
and the source of all divine,
creative, unknowable, eternal mystery
is just a smidge too much
responsibility to put on one fragile,
human psyche. It's like asking
somebody to swallow the sun. It just
completely warps and distorts egos,
and it creates all these unmanageable
expectations about performance. And I
think the pressure of that has been
killing off our artists for the last
500 years. (again, emphasis is mine)

Why Develop Strengths? Our research shows that strengths
development interventions can produce
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Engagement, in turn, can improve
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profitability, customer engagement,
and safety. Over the past decade,
Gallup has surveyed more than 10
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their engagement. Only one-third
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work, I have the opportunity to do
what I do best every day." In a Gallup
Poll, among those who disagreed or
strongly disagreed with this
statement, not one single person was
emotionally engaged on the job.
Analyses of our clients' employee
engagement scores show that workgroups
that receive strengths development and
employee engagement interventions
achieve more robust growth in
engagement scores than do groups that
receive a standard engagement
intervention without a strengths
development component. Our studies
also indicate that employees who have
the opportunity to focus on their
strengths every day are six times as
likely to be engaged in their jobs and
more than three times as likely to
report having an excellent quality of
life. (emphasis mine) A strengths development strategy
not only can dramatically boost
employee engagement, it can also
substantially decrease disengagement.

So to answer your question, there is a way to find out what your "talent" is (Gallup), this becomes the basis of the word talented (or "genius" as Gilbert puts it) and you can acquire, develop and foster this using Dr. Anders Ericsson's program of deliberate practice. It's a very long answer and I hope it helps! :)

+1: Very good answer. // Are some suggesting that science has made the word 'talent' less applicable?
–
Jim G.Apr 26 '11 at 18:33

2

+1: Wonderful! I would have gone with the simple innate sense of the word "talent", but I thoroughly enjoyed your answer.
–
taserianApr 26 '11 at 19:36

3

This answer isn't actually addressing the usage of the word "talent" as mixed with "acquire" or "learn". EL&U isn't the place for a rehashing of the self-help movement or training seminars. Most of the content here is completely irrelevant to the English language and the question being asked.
–
MrHenApr 28 '11 at 19:19

5

@pageman: Please don't yell. The McLaughlin story is irrelevant because it doesn't talk about the usage of the word "talent" nor does it say if McLaughlin ever became good at golf. It just talks about what he plans to do. Nor does it suggest that McLaughlin, even if he does succeed, didn't actually possess an innate golfing talent. I read your entire answer you posted over 500 words from other people while adding less than 150 of your own. I am assuming you don't understand what I am saying; I don't know how else to say it. Your answer is mostly chaff. It looks impressive but that is all.
–
MrHenApr 28 '11 at 19:32

2

@page: "From a psychological standpoint, there are differing views on the source of talent. Dr. Anders Ericsson, for example, claims blah. Elizabeth Gilbert, however, suggests blah. But since the issue is in contention, you are safe to use the word 'talent' in conjunction with 'learn' or 'acquire.'" Each blah could include a small blockquote for entertainment value. The point I am making is that the relevant part of your answer is drowned out by irrelevant noise. A little bit of extra information can be good; too much just clutters the site with non-English related stuffs.
–
MrHenApr 28 '11 at 19:58

Some things cannot be learned and I would think would be considered 'talent'. In music, 'perfect pitch' varies from one person to another. I had never heard of it until I was told by a chorus master in college that I had it. He had given me a piece of music I had never seen before and was asked to sing it, with minimal accompaniment from him. At one point the melody jumped from an E-flat to a high C. I hit the note and he played the key on the piano and asked me how I knew what that note was supposed to sound like. I told him it just seemed like that's the way it would be and he asked me about 'perfect pitch', which I had never heard of. I have since learned that it varies from person to person: some people have it on only one note, some on all notes, with others ranging in between. There are most likely parallels in art (painting), sewing, knitting, many other fields of endeavor.